Negative Impacts of Social

Networking Sites For Businesses

Using social media for business purposes can be awesome if you know what you are doing. After all, Google+ got to 100

million users in just 7 months and Pinterest is threatening to eclipse that record. Facebook should have over 1 billion users by the end of 2012 and

YouTube has more than 3 billion views a day (more than 1 trillion a year).

If part of your marketing strategy includes advertising where the people

are, then utilizing multiple social networking sites for business is a good

idea. However, again, you must understand what you are doing in

order to take advantage of this strategy, otherwise it will be a waste of

time, energy, and money.

Here are some of the lesser known negative impacts of social

networking sites for businesses and how to avoid these problems.

Do you understand the possibilities that exist with social networking sites?

Most small business owners think of social media as something that their

teenagers do on their cell phones.

Negative Impacts of Social Networking Sites | Knowledge

They underestimate what all can be accomplished with social media,

therefore, one of the negative impacts of social networking sites for business

is that businesses don’t take it seriously, don’t educate themselves on

strategies, and the marketing plan crumbles.

The reality is that there is a strategy and a methodology to implementing a

successful social media marketing plan. First, what are your

goals? Do you want to increase brand recognition, increase sales and

revenue, improve customer service, increase opt ins and subscribers to your site, improve your site’s SEO,

etc…?

Once you determine your goals, there are several social media management

tools to consider, such as types of media (blogs, articles, videos, press release, local search, etc…), pay per

click to your target audience, engagement tools, and more.

But in order to create a useful social media marketing plan, you will want to

invest in social media manager training to better understand what is

possible with social media.

Traditional marketing teaches us to broadcast our features and benefits to the masses and hope that a percentage

of listeners purchase. Carrying this flawed methodology over to your

social media plan is another one of the negative impacts of social

networking sites for businesses.

Negative Impacts of Social Networking Sites | Engaging

Social media provides you with one of the best opportunities to engage with

others, brand yourself and your business as experts, answer questions,

and earn business. However, if you simply put promotional posts on your

Facebook Page asking people to purchase products, you’ll campaign will

fail.

Ask questions, put out pulls, elicit feedback, write informational blogs,

record ‘how to’ videos relevant to users, run contests, etc… Be creative with your engagement strategies and you will see your goals accomplished.

If this is something that you’re not comfortable with or have the skill set for, then you may want to consider

what a social media marketing firm can do for you.

With a flawed engagement strategy comes a gross underestimation of the

amount of time needed to run a successful social media marketing

campaign.

Negative Impacts of Social Networking Sites | Time

One of the negative impacts of social networking sites is that while it’s free

to use, it does take time to engage, and this time generally costs money, in the

form of opportunity costs, hiring an employee, or outsourcing it to

someone else. If you are looking to implement this type of strategy, make sure that you allocate time to engage.

Also, it is a good idea to invest in time saving technologies, such as a social

media dashboard, in order to help you become more efficient in your

engagements. The easier and faster engaging is, the more likely you are to

continue doing it.